Bringing History Home

Bringing History Home focuses on how to make the teaching of high school history both an intellectual challenge and an experiential adventure. The book focuses on mobilizing pedagogy and curriculum through a variety of activities and resources–music, poetry, field trips, simulations, crafts, current news and civics–to deepen students’ involvement with the subject matter. History classes should be memorable. Bringing History Home provides support and inspiration to education majors, newly minted teachers, and seasoned professionals.

As a master teacher, Schechter provides examples from his many decades of remarkable teaching and curriculum creation, based on his own interdisciplinary, constructivist and active learning approach. This is a wonderful and stimulating book, replete with rich examples from the author’s pedagogy that will help teachers – newer and experienced – to, as Schechter says, “find a style that fits them and utilizes their strengths to the best advantage.” His reflections on the nature of his discipline and the possibilities of “Doing History”; on "the normal vicissitudes of a teacher’s life”; and on "finding a way of being in the classroom” are particularly valuable. The most stimulating book on teaching today’s students I have read. It made me want to get into a social studies classroom and get to it!, History class has meant, for many, memorizing names, dates, and places for a never-ending series of multiple choice tests. Not, however, for students in Bill Schechter’s history classes. In Bringing History Home: A Classroom Teacher’s Quest to Make the Past Matter, Schechter deftly looks at the techniques and materials, the strategies and concepts that he put to work, to great effect, as a high school history teacher. This is not a collection of lesson plans; it is, rather, the revelation of ways to think about how to help students see the reasons that the past matters. Schechter uses poetry, music, field work, and controversy to hook students to the world around them. My son is a high school history teacher—I’m giving this book to him., Both practical and visionary, this book takes us into a classroom where history is not distant but is given to students to make.  At once dynamic and moving, the book is filled with enlivening pedagogical tools that enable students to experience themselves as part of history.  Thank you, Bill Schechter, for showing us how we can rescue public education from the current onslaught of desiccated metrics and make teaching and learning as ethical and transformative as today’s endangered world surely needs schools to be.    , Bill Schechter is the best history teacher I ever had and a beloved legendary instructor from his days at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. Bringing History Home is a godsend for educators looking for ways to inspire their students and foster a love of learning about the past. Bill beautifully chronicles how he and his students brought history to life by becoming musicologists, theater directors, Thoreau cabin builders, mural painters, mock trial judges, tour guides, poets, sociologists, and agents of change. Ultimately, Bill's creative ideas, humorous stories, and life lessons highlight why we need our schools to be innovative, supportive academic communities instead of test prep factories., A warm and inviting reflection on the art and craft of teaching, written by a master educator. This book offers both beginning teachers and veterans insights into how to inspire students to go beyond test scores and numbers.  An important work in these troubled educational times.

Bill Schechter, a proud graduate of New York City’s PS 95 and De Witt Clinton H.S., received an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and did graduate work at Harvard, Berkeley, and Goddard College. He worked as a public school teacher in Massachusetts for 35 years, later serving as a practicum supervisor for the Tufts University and UMass-Boston graduate education programs.